You Are Not a CEO, You Are a Guru
Even in the wonderland of startups there can be dark moments. Moments when your employees, fellow chiefs in something, teams or maybe yourself get this feeling of not being motivated anymore, rinsed, not excited by the big oncoming project, or worse by the product itself. Most of the time people don’t manage to point out what is going wrong with their mood but still can’t deny the energy they got when they started is gone away.
Often it is just a moment in the work life that passes by itself. Sometimes it stays. Often people will hide it in order to keep their working environment untouched by their troubles. Sometimes they will show it and the toxicity of their doubts will spread around them, amongst their team, their colleagues and even the product they work on. Often people who are experiencing this phenomenon will blame themselves. Sometimes they will blame you.
The “faith” phenomenon
In multiple perspectives, startups are different from classically founded companies. Those differences can sound frightening to most of the people: small, young, very innovative, without a 5-years plan set into stone, sometimes totally against the stream and, very often, a bit chaotic. All of this is also what excites a lot of talents and makes them prefer the startups roller-coaster to the quiet journey of classic companies. All of this and something else. Something I call “faith”.
When joining a startup, it is common to make sacrifices; sacrifices a lot of people would consider like pure insanity: lower pay range, hypothetical career perspective, no 9 to 5, relocation, unstable and fast processes renewal, unclear hierarchy, huge amount of extra hours, etc. These are the ritual sacrifices of the startup’s voodoo.
The reason people are accepting these conditions is because most of the startups workers are Believers. They believe in your product. They believe in your product so much, they make those sacrifices without making a big deal out of it.
What could startups offer that would be worth it? Some startup workers will say the excitation of being part of something unique. Others would say the feeling of trying something good for our world, something that solves a real issue and doesn’t create more.
Now boarding passengers on Noah’s Ark
Each startup is a tentative, a trial, to change the world —or part of it— by solving a specific pain. Most of them will fail but few will succeed.
Not only do Believers trust the percentile chance your product is the right answer to the problem, but they also believe your product is going to do it the right way. In a Believer’s mind, things are pretty dichotomous: either it is right, either it is wrong. When it comes to saving —part of— the world, compromise is out of the table: things have to be done and they have to be done in a fair and correct way. Indeed the notion of reaching an ideal is inherent to the Believer’s presence.
For Believers, ideal is not an utopia: it is a goal they have to fill to gain a real sense of accomplishment in their adventure. However they are not naive: they know the path will be a hard and full of ambushes, but they also think it is worth it. For them, the pilgrimage started the moment they accepted the sacrifices they made to join.
By joining the ark, they proved they are ready to risk their lives —at least their careers— just to be part of an unique, ambitious and maybe a bit dangerous adventure. They don’t expect you to direct the ship but they are expecting you to show them the direction on a map and to tell them more about the promised land.
“People want direction on where they are going… NOT micro-direction on how to get there.”
Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why
The path of the Pilgrim
As they join, Believers already have a huge stock of faith in themselves. This is why it doesn’t take them long to anticipate about the company culture (even if this one is non-existent) and they soon manage to start building the dedication of their cult without the need of any external trigger (like the base of a product or some boring but very necessary feature). As Believers think they are part of a community more than a company, they are also incredible team players. Driven by their ideal they also keep taking initiatives to make their workplace a better world. Therefor Believers take great care of making the new coming disciples comfortable and enjoy these moments as an opportunity to share not only their vision but also their energy. Believers are a incredibly efficient and very cheap way to spread your company culture and product vision among your employees.
Thus they are moved by their faith and they re-inject all the satisfaction they get from their dedication not only into the product they are creating/shaping —directly or indirectly depending of their position— but also into the startup itself. So far everything goes fine and there is no sign of upcoming worries with this wonderful devotee.
Sadly this self-powered situation can drive the Believer to a very exhausted state. Indeed Faith is a wonderful energy supply but it has the dramatic downside of making people denial when it comes to flesh related topics like when the body can’t follow the mind anymore. This it is why it is very common to notice a Believer only when he/she reaches the burn out point.
Faith is not like patience. You can make your employees more patient (at least temporary) by showing them roadmaps, giving them raises and fancy titles or changing their work processes. However when it comes to Faith, all of this is powerless (or worse: completely counterproductive).
What is a Believer expecting to see?
After all the question is legitimate. Miracles? Bleeding palms? Apparitions?
Maybe a bit of all of that, somehow. Maybe they just want to feel that their god heard them. Like in every human society the feeling of belonging to a group is vital. This is why Believers need a common cult with a mythology (the product story), prayers (the specific vocabulary developed along the startup growth) and, maybe, secret handshakes (because sharing a bit of awkwardness makes stronger bounds).
Likewise Believers need to be reminded very often why they are here because they need a cause to rally around. This is why they want you to revives their faith regularly, they want you to give them the feeling they are not lost souls or worse: total idiots! This role is not easy to assume because it is not only about speaking and telling stories, it is about believing in it. To inspire Believers you have to be a Believer yourself. Otherwise you’ll just be a liar. Be assured that despite all the respect your Believers might have for you as their spiritual guide, they won’t keep showing you any as a skeptic.
Keeping the things true and simple to create the mantras and values should be a no-brainer because it usually originates in the core reason of the startup presence and birth: the idea.
The Big Bang Theory
If you are a founding member of your startup, chances are pretty high you faced one of these 2 patterns: the Pragmatist or the Dreamer.
The Pragmatist: a bunch of folks (or just one) found a niche and wanted to make money out of it so they created a company and started looking for some cash
The Dreamer: a bunch of folks (or just one) had a dream and wanted to make it happen so they created a company and started looking for some cash.
These two paths are very alike but the consequences of it are clearly opposite.
Let’s imagine a simple situation where the Pragmatists and Dreamers meet people. They will obviously speak about their product. While the Pragmatists will explain the niche (which might require a very specific audience if the idea solves a very pointed pain) and will be trying to convince their audience their idea is valid, the Dreamers they will always start by telling the dream they had, how beautiful it could be if it turn out to become reality and why they believed in it and will be involved into storytelling, inspiring audiences and spreading ideas.
Whenever the Pragmatists and the Dreamers would be both proposing the same service to people, their fates will still be very different.
Depending how you spread your product’s DNA, you will not only attract a different kind of audience but also generate different kind of reaction to it. Indeed by speaking about logic and money, the Pragmatists speak to the audience’s cortical brain (the rational part) and by speaking about stories and imagination, the Dreamers speak to the audience’s limbic brain (the emotional part).
While it is pretty easy to attract people by speaking to their reason, it is more efficient to keep them by speaking to their emotions. This is why what matters to the customers but also the employees is not the “What?”, it is the “Why?”.
The Holy Why
Answering Why is crucial for a startup because it is the only aspect about your product entering straight into your audience’s heart. Emotion is the link between a product vision and the humans. The humans who consume it but also the humans who make it.
To rally people around your product you need to provide them a cause, not a number written in the sky. Everybody can generate numbers. Only a few can generate emotions. The story behind your product and its birth has to inspire the people who take part to the life of it. This is why Believers are so keen of knowing the Genesis (and all the anecdotes). They are the Apostles of your product: they will carry your product story around the world starting by inside your company.
“Chase the vision, not the money. The money will end up following you.”
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com
Moreover having a strong Why —a strong story— provides solid and stable foundations to a startup. If this part is hollow or weak, your startup might collapse at some very strategic moments (growth, new challenges, new territories, processes renewal, money issues, competitors getting more aggressive, etc.).
The two-headed dog guarding your temple
“Why?” is a formidable question to answer because it provides an answer that will solve not one but two problems: your company culture (what do you and your employees share?) and the product vision (why do we exist?). Thereby company culture and product vision are very related.
Having a strong company culture and product vision is a perfect solution to considerably reduce the management workload. Indeed when the values and the direction are set and understood, there is no need for you or management to remind employees about it because they are feeling more in control, more self-responsible but also but more willing to keep the balance in their workspace (this is especially true with Believers as they consider their workplace as a temple). This is why future-proof startups invest time and effort into company culture and product vision on the earliest stages.
Company culture and product vision are both non-material, pretty head-in-the-clouds and often considered as not valuable by founders and first team members, or at least not necessary (this is why it often happens the product vision is low level), especially in the beginning. Of course some startups perfectly managed to deal without it and still exist. But do they still exist as startups? No. Company culture and product vision are the fuel of healthy and great work in startups.
“Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”
Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
If we go back to the Pragmatists and the Dreamers, we can easily imagine which group will quickly consolidate as a classic company and which one will have a development more oriented on spreading a message more than a product. The less energy a startup puts into its product the more able to quickly adjust to the market it is. Having a wonderful company culture and an inspiring product vision won’t prevent the Dreamers from closing down after few months or years but this is why startups exist: to try something different and risky instead of reproducing good old recipes and staying in the comfort zone. This is a risk every innovative business has to deal with. The soonest you and your employees accept death as an obviousness —and maybe a fatality— the most you will enjoy this unique experience.
Faith Stories
I met a lot of people who one day stopped believing and then left the startup and the colleagues they used to love (sometimes more that they could have imagined being able to). Their stories often sound very similar but this doesn’t make it less valuable.
The most common element that marked me is the storytelling aspect. Whenever people from management or their leads were speaking to them, as a group or as a single person, it was always the same monologue about sales, number of paying users, investors, featuring in the AppStore and other GooglePlay, famous but also obscure awards and those bastards of competitors. It never touched the core reason of the Believers’ presence.
“We believe in the product but management doesn’t.
They believe in Scrum and money.”
To illustrate this situation you can imagine having, on one side, management figures emitting a certain wave length and on the other side the Believers waiting to get a signal while browsing the band for another wave length. So, in barely no occasion, were the management waves received clearly by the Believers. It is a dramatic situation of people speaking a language their audience can not understand. Don’t get me wrong I am not saying money and numbers are not an important topic: I had my own business for years and I know for sure money and numbers are important in our modern society. All Believers know that as well. However if numbers are important, reaching the ideal is nothing less than vital. Indeed, for a Believer, numbers are ridiculous if considered on a life scale because all that matters is the experiences he/she is taking part to. If you doubt it, just remember all the sacrifices the Believer made to join: if he/she cared about numbers and money he/she would have never even consider joining. For a Believer, being part of something unique, of creating something beautiful, of initializing a whole movement in our world is the best currency in the world.
A unicorns world
Startups are a different kind of companies.
Believers are a different kind of employees.
In our very innovative and challenging world it doesn’t take long to figure out how much one needs the others and vice versa.
When they join a startup, Believers are not expecting a work experience but a life experience. This is something classic companies can’t offer to them whenever how talented they are. This difference and the faith they come with make them bring something no standard companies can even dream about because it goes beyond the standards.
However if a startup behaves like a standard company with dry initiatives and sterile innovation expectations (especially if based only on fear about competitors and trends) then, without any surprises, the Believers will give up the cult. Some will quit. Some will stay but will lose just their magic (which I often call “mental quitting”). In both cases it will progressively change the face of the startup to a standard-less-innovative-more-fragile-to-its-competitors company.
Daily miracles
By joining and staying, Believers showed you they trusted you. If you admit your dream —your idea-materialization, your product — could not exist without them then you have to give them the key to it. If you can’t accept to share your dream’s successes and failures with them then you are not dreaming anymore: you are creating your Believers’ nightmare by turning your startup into a company.
You don’t need to be a god to have believers. You already have them.
You don’t need miracles to keep them. You just have to inspire them enough to make the miracle happen: this beautiful miracle of people joining forces, minds and talents to create something beautiful and exceptional (let’s be humble and call it “kickass”).
If you enjoy this article, here are some interesting readings about company culture and stories I would like to recommend to you:
